Bringing Resale to the People : Beni
Dec 20, 2023
I recently learned about a new Chrome Extension called “Beni”. (A Chrome extension is one of those little apps that pops up when you’re using the browser Chrome.) Beni is an extension that helps you buy any clothing you’re looking for …. secondhand! It recognizes what you’re shopping for and finds used options of that same or a similar product.
How it Works
For example, I’d like to find another color of my favorite sweater from last year. I find my sweater on JCREW’s website, but it’s sold out. Beni pops up on the right side with a ton of used sweaters very similar to the one I want; nothing matches exactly, but I can definitely scratch my itch with something that is almost the same, and cheaper.
Another example is this Coach sneaker. Beni pops up and gives me a ton of options of different, similar sneakers. None of them are exactly what I’m looking for, some of them are actually cooler than what I was looking for which is an unexpected surprise.
Data
Beni has access to real time data from the top 40 resale marketplaces including eBay, Poshmark, The Real Real, and ThredUp. That means that Beni’s database can search millions of items in a few seconds to see if it can find you a better secondhand deal for whatever you’re looking for. They actually have over 70% of all online resale apparel in the US aggregated in their data base. They make their money through affiliate shopping, meaning they get a small percentage of items that are clicked and purchased through their extension, app or website.
Origins
I had the chance to chat with Beni’s CEO, Sarah Pinner, last week. Sarah is a self-professed circular economy nerd who is obsessed with waste. She’s also obsessed with people’s behavior and that has led her down a very compelling path. She started out working with food and food waste, eventually working at Imperfect Foods which sells food that doesn’t look perfect but is still perfectly edible. She got some great experience thinking about how to make circular economy solutions attractive, accessible and affordable for more people. I can imagine the parallels between imperfect food and used clothes are plentiful as they are both high quality options that may have some perception issues, but the product itself is good.
During grad school Sarah flipped her attention to clothing, and in 2021 she and her co-founder, Celine Lightfoot, started Beni with the goal of enabling millions of people to change their behavior by bringing resale to them. Of course there are people like me who will scroll through hundreds of used items to find the right one, but I’m pretty sure I’m the exception, not the rule. With Beni, any customer shopping new items can see what similar or same used items are available across all the big resale platforms without having to open a bunch of tabs and search in all of them. I love what Beni could do: bring resale to the masses by meeting them how and where they already shop.
Tech
In their technology, Beni leverages AI to help match and find products similar to whatever people are looking for. Their tech looks at the brand, product title and images to try to match to other items in their database. I think this is a great use-case for AI. It’s also really interesting that we are in a moment of opportunity where resale has come so far in the past 5 years that Beni is actually possible. If they were trying to scale in 2018 before the widespread adoption of online resale, I bet they would be battling a much bigger hill with a real possibility of not succeeding due to slow adoption. The widespread use of online resale and all of the existing marketplaces where most of us shop online resale (Poshmark, eBay, TheRealReal, etc) have made Beni possible.
Growth + Finance
The biggest challenge Beni has to overcome in order to be truly successful is to get a TON of people to download the Chrome extension, app or use the website. As of now Beni has 20,000 users, which is fantastic, and imagine if they could get 2x…5x…10x of that. They need the scale for their business to work. For example, if I were to purchase that $39 JCREW sweater on Poshmark that Beni showed me, Beni would get a small percentage of my purchase, I’m guessing about 5% (just a guess! I don’t know the exact numbers). 5% of $39 is $1.95. If Beni has 20,000 users, let’s assume each one of them purchases one item per month through Beni, and let’s assume the average sales price is $39, like my sweater. So 20,000 customers x 1 item per month x $1.95 affiliate revenue = $39,000 monthly revenue to Beni, which would be $468,000 annually. I like the revenue model for them, as long as they can continue to grow their users and as long as their users continue to find value and purchase items suggested by Beni. Ultimately, they’ll need to make a multiple of their current revenue to pay their team (currently 8 FT employees) and continue to improve and grow their product. It seems quite exciting to me though, largely due to the fact that they have that real time data from 40+ resale marketplaces; they’ve built a strong foundation, they just need it to be adopted by more people.
Download it!
Here are the links to their Chrome Desktop Extension and their Mobile App Download.
Win-Win
I see this as a win-win for the resale industry as a whole because Beni is not competing with any of the marketplaces, it is providing another access point to resale in a different way. For the marketplaces, integrating with Beni is helpful to them as it’s another way to acquire customers, almost akin to their marketing goals and budget. Beni is delivering customers to resale marketplaces who have a high intent to purchase because they are already looking at the item they set out to buy.
On the brand front, so far Beni is not integrated with many brand’s resale programs, but it is integrated with Worn Wear (Patagonia’s resale program) and some of resale platform Treet’s brands. The Patagonia example is fun as you can see above, Beni is serving a suggestion for a Worn Wear product while I’m looking for a full price Patagonia product. I love that!
I am really excited about this business and I hope you will download the extension or check out their website to support them.
For the Record…
Some of you have asked me if my posts, especially when I feature one business, are sponsored by the company I’m writing about. The short answer is no, I have not yet been paid for any of my newsletters. Everything I’ve written since I launched this in May 2023 has been what I wanted to write about without any compensation.
Looking ahead, I may do some sponsored posts, but 1) I will always let you know, 2) I will only ever write about things that I think are worth writing about, and 3) the opinions will be mine. I would love it if I could financially support some of the time that I put into writing this every week.
The Untangling Circularity Podcast
We dropped 2 NEW PODCASTS in the last week!
Resale’s Impact on Charity Donations. This was an incredible conversation with Steven Bethel of Bank&Vogue, Tonny Colyn of The Salvation Army Thrift Store and Daniel Rodriquez of Housing Works.
Our final episode is just me and Laura talking about our favorite moments from this season and spreading holiday cheer. It’s 22 minutes of feel good.
When we are back from the holiday break (CAN NOT WAIT FOR A WEEK OFF) we will also be sharing a Season 1 report out highlighting key insights from our 12 episode season.
Ciao until next week-
Cynthia
